Seagate Corp. Tuesday announced a new family of lower-power 3.5-in desktop hard-disk drives the company said have the highest performance and best power efficiency in their class.

The new Barracuda LP drive series come in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities and run at an industry-first 5900-rpm spindle speed. Most consumer-class 3.5-inch desktop drives spin at 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm.

Seagate said the middle-of-the-road spindle speed approach offers 25% less power than standard 5400 rpm, 3.5-inch desktop drives, and up to 50% less power than 7200-rpm drives. The new Barracuda LP drives use 3 watts of power while idle, and 5.6 watts when operating.

By comparison, Samsung's Eco-Green 5400-rpm desktop drives use 4 watts when idle and 5.5 watts when operating, and Western Digital's Caviar Green drives use 3 watts when idle and 5.72 watts when operating.

Seagate's new Barracuda drives are aimed at use in lower-power desktops PCs, and for external storage devices for personal users, as well as small offices or home offices. The drives come with a 32MB cache, have a sustained data sequential write rate of 84MB/sec, and an average seek time of 14 milliseconds.

The new drives come with SecureEraseSelf-Encryption firmware, PowerTrim and PowerChoice software, which monitors power use and moderates drive spin-up to conserve power.

The suggested retail price for the Barracuda LP drives are US$118 for the 1TB model, $156 for the 1.5TB and $358 for the 2TB drive.

This story, "Seagate announces new green desktop drives" was originally published by
Computerworld.